The pair settled down into a jet-set life that included his music and her beauty business but always as much privacy as they could manage. Iman -- who once said, "I am married to David Jones. David Bowie and David Jones are two totally different people" -- told fellow supermodel Naomi Campbell in 2013 that shunning the limelight was intentional.

"First, I think you've got to feel hot for each other and respect each other," Iman said when asked about the secret to her marriage. "That's where it starts. Also, we are very private, so we decided from early on that we will keep the press and editors and everybody out of our house."

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"That she would be my wife, in my head, was a done deal," he said. "I'd never gone after anything in my life with such passion in all my life. I just knew she was the one."

Bowie had a son, filmmaker Duncan Jones, with his first wife, Angie. He and Iman welcomed a daughter in 2000: Alexandria Zahra Jones, known as "Lexi." The model said that when it came to child-rearing, "David is measured, sensible yet at the same time fun and relaxed with Lexi. I'm the disciplinarian!"

With homes in London and the island of Mustique, they kept their home base in New York. Iman helped nurse Bowie back to health in 2004 after he had a heart attack from a blocked artery.

Though they retained their privacy (to the point of not allowing photo spreads of their luxurious homes), the advent of social media helped the family share a bit more of their lives.

"If I say something about David, I get 1,000 tweets. if I say something about my business, just a few," Iman told Campbell. "The more personal, the better."

They were so private that few knew of Bowie's cancer diagnosis until after his death.

On Friday, two days before his death, Iman helped celebrate his 69th birthday and the release of his new album, "Blackstar," with several posts and reposts of photos of her husband.